Hi! I just got the idea for Valve. If they could add percentage porting status games which they are porting now. It would be good for both sides, because gamers will know how close their game is, and Valve will have peace. What is yours opinion on this topic ?//If i made a language mistakes, sorry. :)

As a customer I would love this feature, because rather than blind anticipation, I would have a concrete progress bar.

However, as a developer, I can understand why Valve would not want to do this. Even behind the scenes, they do not practise such strict progress bars. They have a very open-minded philosophy about what employees should be working on and so you would see progress bars moving back and forth constantly as they work on the project.

Customers would obviously not understand (crude numerical examples to follow) why a game which was at 51% has stayed that way for a long time, or why something at 99% went down to 85% all of a sudden. They don't want to have to explain everything to us because its extra work for them, and more friction in the game creation process.

Would be nice. But I think it's not possible.Because, I guess, in a progress of porting a game to another OS, there is always something to do. Look at the Valve Linux Team blog how they improved performance of L4D2 from 6fps to 315fps. It must be hard to say when the game is finished.

Calculating what is still to do and it is how much percentage of the whole work would take more time than porting the game. Also as they discover newer and newer bugs, the whole TODO list becomes longer and longer. More calculation instead of real work.

Valve games are mostly ready. We have GoldSrc games and Source games already, so the engines are ported. We don't see many games because of 1) marketing reasons, 2) they're still working on bugfixes.

I myself would just like a monthly update on how a game is coming along. Prior to Steam Beta beginning it looked like L4D was coming along quite well but since Steam Beta was launched, not a peep about it. If someone at Valve could just take two minutes and give an update would be a great thing.

Strict timeline is why every single mainstream game is half finished product :)

Companies like Blizzard and Valve take their time, but when they release something, at least story, gameplay and design is complete and amazing (you can't avoid bugs and problems at start, too many PC configurations out there).

Awesome games and awesome ports is what I want, I can live without progress bar :P